‘Alien Nation’ —A Sci-Fi Flick Doubling As A Metaphor For The Asian-American Experience— Is Ripe For Reconsideration

Graham Baker’s 1988 film Alien Nation (currently streaming on Starz) is a sometimes-brilliant metaphor for the experience of Asian immigrants in the United States. My parents immigrated here from Taiwan in 1972, just seven years after the repeal of this country’s “Nations Origins Act,” an offshoot of the Chinese Exclusion Act that restricted, rather than outright banned, the number of Chinese allowed to pursue the American Dream. My mother went to school in Arkansas where busing was still segregated. The stain of racism is indelible on the fabric of this country. Racism towards Asians is deeply-ingrained and largely invisible. We are a “favored” minority: popular culture casting the men as sexually unthreatening and the women as sexually exotic, until at some point they age into wizened mentors or fire-breathing dragon ladies. All wear the expectation of high intelligence and industry in a way that will sometimes become threatening to white Americans worried about their jobs. In 1982, Chinese draftsman Vincent Chin was killed in Detroit by two white autoworkers triggered by the penetration of Japanese automobiles into the American market. They shouted invectives as they murdered him, were convicted of manslaughter, fined three thousand dollars and released on probation.

Set in 1992, Alien Nation details the arrival of an alien species on a derelict craft. They’re genetically-engineered slave labor of an unknown species, four million strong, and marooned off the coast of San Francisco, a port town famously rich in Asian diversity. The film begins as a murder mystery and leads to the discovery that an alien drug is being introduced into the “Newcomer” population through the agency of an upper class seeking to exploit them. There are echoes of the Opium Wars in Britain’s colonial history even here in the film’s MacGuffin. Alien Nation, if you look around the standard buddy comedy trappings, is stunning. Grizzled detective Sykes (James Caan) loses his partner one night to a couple of doped-up Newcomers – what he calls “Slags” in the way bigots use racial invectives – and agrees to take on the first Newcomer detective, Sam Francisco (Mandy Patinkin) as his partner in the hopes they can figure out who’s behind the murders. Sykes is openly a bigot. One of Sykes’ peers, Fedorchuk (Peter Jason) complains that the Slags are clannish and only speak English when it suits them, that because of their superior intelligence they will lose their jobs to them eventually. Fascinatingly, Sykes’ dead partner is black and Fedorchuk’s partner Alterez (Tony Perez) is Mexican-American, isolating racism against the Slags, much like racism against Asians, as something acceptable in a world where racism is otherwise unacceptable.

While questioning a human foreman (Thomas Wagner), the foreman, looking at pictures of suspects, apologizes that all the Slags look alike to him. The Newcomers like food that smells strange (raw beaver meat), sometimes offensive to humans – and they don’t appear to be able to hold their alcohol. The females, however, have found a foothold in human society as sex workers. Their exoticism and implications of some sort of arcane sexual knowledge mirroring the fetishization of Asian women in the West originating from generations of American servicemen first meeting Asian women in foreign brothels. Sykes wonders early on if Sam is embarrassed by naturalization services anglicizing his name as a kind of joke and Sam wonders if Sykes is bothered that Sykes in the Newcomer language means “shithead.” These conversations, misunderstandings, preconceptions are all things I’ve dealt with as an Asian-American. The questions about when I learned to speak English; the questions about the unique spelling of my name and how I pronounce my “real” name, invitations for me to go back to where I came from. Alien Nation doesn’t break any new ground when it resolves its perfunctory narrative, but it’s something special while dealing with how Americans are ever at war with the demons of our past. Sam says to Sykes:

“I hope you understand how special your world is, how unique a people you humans are. Which is why it is all the more painful and confusing to us that so few of you seem capable of living up to the ideals you set for yourselves.”

It’s a poignant sentiment beautifully expressed. Imperfections and all, Alien Nation is a singular film about the Asian-American experience appearing in the unlikeliest of places. The depiction of Asians in the ’80s in mainstream Hollywood ranged from Short Round and Long Duck Dong to Mr. Miyagi and the guy who sold the Mogwai in Gremlins. So while Alien Nation could be criticized as sometimes trafficking in the Asian stereotypes it ostensibly challenges, it also is singular as a big-budget popular American entertainment that deals critically with the idea of racism against Asians in any form. It’s far from perfect, but it has perfect moments. It’s due for a reconsideration.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is due in 2020. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.